Grace Hopper (1906 - 1992)

Grace Hopper was a computer scientist in the United States Navy whose ideas led to the development of the widely used computer language COBOL. Hopper rose to the rank of rear admiral and served as a private consultant to Digital Corp. until her death.

Known for
Popularizing women in computing

Invented one of the first compiler-related tools

Popularized the idea of machine-independent programming languages, which led to the development of COBOL, an early high-level programming language still in use

Grace Hopper is famous for her nanoseconds visual aid. People (such as generals and admirals) used to ask her why satellite communication took so long. She started handing out pieces of wire that were just under one foot long (11.8 inches (30 cm)—the distance that light travels in one nanosecond. She gave these pieces of wire the metonym "nanoseconds." She was careful to tell her audience that the length of her nanoseconds was actually the maximum speed the signals would travel in a vacuum, and that signals would travel more slowly through the actual wires that were her teaching aids. Later she used the same pieces of wire to illustrate why computers had to be small to be fast. At many of her talks and visits, she handed out "nanoseconds" to everyone in the audience, contrasting them with a coil of wire 984 feet (300 meters) long,[40] representing a microsecond. Later, while giving these lectures while working for DEC, she passed out packets of pepper, calling the individual grains of ground pepper picoseconds

While she was working on a Mark II Computer at Harvard University in 1947,[37] her associates discovered a moth that was stuck in a relay; the moth impeded the operation of the relay. While neither Hopper nor her crew mentioned the phrase "debugging" in their logs, the case was held as an instance of literal "debugging." For many years, the term bug had been in use in engineering. Source: Wikipedia

Find more
Wikipedia

Oral History of Captain Grace Hopper - Interviewed by: Angeline Pantages 1980, Naval Data Automation Command, Maryland.

Works based on
The Queen of Code (2015), a documentary film about Grace Hopper produced by FiveThirtyEight.